Brackets

Busting most of the nation's NCAA tournament brackets took all of one game. When 11th-seed Dayton beat sixth-seed Ohio State on Thursday with a basket in the final seconds, the upset upended the elusive hope millions had to complete a perfect bracket. Of the 11.01 million brackets submitted in ESPN's contest, 80.3% picked Ohio State to beat Dayton. The number of entries, incidentally, zoomed up from last year's 8.15 million. 2014 NCAA tournament bracket The numbers weren't any better in Yahoo's Tourney Pick'em, where 83.7% of entries went with Ohio State.

ARLINGTON, Texas - Well everyone had it wrong - you, me, the postman and the NCAA selection committee. All that teeth-gnashing over tournament seeding has produced an NCAA championship game between a No. 7 and No. 8. Let's hear it for a collective No. 15! Monday night, though, Connecticut and Kentucky will be playing for the only number that counts No.1. No. 8 Kentucky dramatically capped Saturday night with a 74-73 victory over No. 2 Wisconsin in the second NCAA semifinal game before a Final Four record crowd of 79,444 fans at AT&T Stadium.

The slew of early NCAA tournament upsets hasn't helped those clinging to the elusive hope of completing a perfect bracket. Just 16 perfect brackets remained in the Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge through Stanford's upset of New Mexico on Friday, according to the company. Quicken Loans wouldn't disclose how many entries were received, but contest rules capped the number at 15 million, one per person. The going wasn't much better in ESPN's contest. Sixty-six perfect brackets of 11.01 million entries remained.

The slew of early NCAA tournament upsets hasn't helped those clinging to the elusive hope of completing a perfect bracket. Just 16 perfect brackets remained in the Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge through Stanford's upset of New Mexico on Friday, according to the company. Quicken Loans wouldn't disclose how many entries were received, but contest rules capped the number at 15 million, one per person. The going wasn't much better in ESPN's contest. Sixty-six perfect brackets of 11.01 million entries remained.

The NCAA men's basketball tournament, aka March Madness, kicks off in earnest with 16 matches Thursday and 16 more Friday. How do you keep up with all the games -- let alone watch them all? Here are some apps to help cope with all the madness. NCAA March Madness Live If you want to watch the tournament from your smartphone or tablet, you can do so with NCAA March Madness Live. The app is free to download and lets you watch games shown on CBS at no charge. Users have to sign in with their cable provider in order to watch games broadcast on TBS, TNT and truTV.

Call it the audacity of chalk. President Obama's NCAA bracket is conspicuously devoid of upsets, with all of the top seeds in the college basketball championship advancing to the Final Four. Three of those four No. 1 seeds -- Duke, Pittsburgh and Ohio State -- also just so happen to hail from swing states Obama hopes to carry again in 2012. But the president ultimately picks the team from a deeply red state, Kansas, to win it all, defeating Ohio State in the championship game. "I think that Kansas has more firepower," Obama said of the pick.

After spilling coffee onto my couch, I craved an expedient solution to the bane of small-space dwellers: Where to place a cup of coffee when scanning the morning news? I loathed the idea of a side table with gangly legs. I covet every inch in my 550-square-foot, one-bedroom Los Feliz flat. Solution: Convert a leaded glass window into a shelf/table using wall brackets as support. I wanted the support brackets to be as unobtrusive as possible so the shelf would appear to float.

An upside-down American flag is considered a signal of distress. And that's the feeling Robert Rosebrock had when he looked up and noticed the red, white and blue street-lamp banners outside the Department of Veterans Affairs' West Los Angeles Medical Center were in disarray - tattered, tangled around the poles or flapping upside-down in the breeze. "It was disgraceful," said Rosebrock, a 71-year-old U.S. Army veteran who arranged for the flags' installation 11 months ago using $12,000 donated by Metabolic Studio, a charitable arm of the Annenberg Foundation.

College of the Canyons will host Moorpark in a first-round game at the Southern California regional tournament of the state community college basketball playoffs Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Canyons (8-2, 19-9 overall) will be representing the Mountain Valley Conference and Moorpark (5-7, 16-10 overall) will be representing the Western State Conference.

Re "Details, Mr. Romney," Editorial, Sept. 11 In reducing tax rates by 20%, the rate reduction is greater for those in the higher brackets. For example, income once taxed at a marginal rate of 25% would be taxed at 20%, while the 36% bracket would go down to about 29%. As for the loopholes, Mitt Romney will have a far harder time getting a fractious Congress to agree on which ones to close if he doesn't identify and discuss them now than he will if he discloses and discusses them now, wins the presidency and has the specific public mandate he campaigned on. Robert Silver Los Angeles ALSO: Letters: Telling a 9/11 story Letters: AEG's hold on City Hall Letters: Breakfast in the classroom

Busting most of the nation's NCAA tournament brackets took all of one game. When 11th-seed Dayton beat sixth-seed Ohio State on Thursday with a basket in the final seconds, the upset upended the elusive hope millions had to complete a perfect bracket. Of the 11.01 million brackets submitted in ESPN's contest, 80.3% picked Ohio State to beat Dayton. The number of entries, incidentally, zoomed up from last year's 8.15 million. 2014 NCAA tournament bracket The numbers weren't any better in Yahoo's Tourney Pick'em, where 83.7% of entries went with Ohio State.

One part of President Obama's NCAA tournament bracket didn't please George Washington men's basketball Coach Mike Lonergan. The president picked Lonergan's team, seeded ninth and making its first NCAA appearance since 2007, to lose to eighth-seed Memphis on Friday in Raleigh, N.C. "You picked Memphis over your neighbors in Foggy Bottom? Come on man!" Lonergan tweeted at the president Wednesday night. INTERACTIVE: Times' NCAA tournament bracket George Washington's campus sits a half-mile from the White House.

Well, the NCAA bracket came out Sunday night for the men's basketball tournament starting this week. Have you filled out yours yet? Can we have a peek at your Final Four? How many No. 1 seeds have you got in there? MARCH MADNESS: Fill out your bracket Surely you have Wichita State - the top seed in the Midwest Regional which made the Final Four last year and is the only undefeated team in this year's tournament. Or are the Shockers your upset special? After all, they didn't play a particularly tough schedule and may have to get through Michigan, Duke and Louisville - not to mention a possible first-weekend matchup against Kentucky - just to get to the national semifinals in Arlington, Texas.

Think you can guess the winners of all 67 games in this spring's NCAA men's basketball championship tournament? Warren Buffett is betting a fortune that you can't. The Omaha investing guru is insuring a Quicken Loans promotion that will award $1 billion (yes, with a B) to anyone who can correctly guess the winners of every game of this spring's NCAA men's basketball championship tournament. PHOTOS: Top 10 Southern California companies Detroit-based Quicken, the nation's fourth-largest mortgage lender, and Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway will pay the prize in 40 annual installments of $25 million.

Stanford and Oregon continue to form a Pac-12 sandwich around Alabama after combining for 110 weekend points as the Crimson Tide held Ole Miss pointless. Oklahoma has moved up 12 spots since opening day in a rebuttal to Rankman's preseason evaluation. Notre Dame, one win from the Bowl Championship Series title last season, is out of the poll but can take the No. 22 away from Arizona State by putting a fork in the Sun Devils on Saturday. Maryland and Texas Tech were a combined 8-0 in the September instructional league and have earned call-ups to the 25-rankings roster.

Whether you're constructing a deck, adding a porch or building a gazebo, the job begins with footings that penetrate your climate's frost line. In many cases, a simple posthole footing is ideal. This type of footing is quick, easy and relatively inexpensive. If you plan on an enclosed addition, of course, you'll want a continuous footing that surrounds a crawl space beneath the floor. Anything short of a major structural addition will rest on simple posts and spot footings.

November 3, 2008 | Roy M. Wallack, Wallack is an Irvine-based endurance cyclist and runner and the coauthor of "Bike for Life: How to Ride to 100."

Big, burly bodybuilders generally don't do them. Neither do little old blue-haired ladies. Nor does anyone in between. That's because, as strength training goes, the pull-up, the king of the back exercises, is quite difficult. But the benefits of this rigorous, compound body-weight movement -- which targets the latissimus dorsi along with a host of supporting muscles -- are so pronounced for posture, balance, flexibility and overall upper-body strength that everyone should try to do at least one or two at home.

“The Hangover Part III” might have been a flop, but that doesn't mean its premise won't be recycled in other movies again. And again. As we find out in the just-released trailer for "Last Vegas," the twist this time is to age the film's cast by 30 years. Robert De Niro functions as the new Bradley Cooper, Michael Douglas the new Ed Helms, Kevin Kline the new Justin Bartha, and Morgan Freeman the new Zach Galifianakis (yes, that's a lofty comparison) in the ensemble comedy coming out in November.

COLLEGE WORLD SERIES UCLA vs. NORTH CAROLINA STATE Where: TD Ameritrade Park, Omaha. When: Tuesday, 5 p.m. PDT. Records: UCLA 45-17, North Carolina State 50-14. TV: ESPN2. Update: North Carolina State has rotation questions after ace Carlos Rodon, who threw eight scoreless innings in an 8-1 victory over North Carolina on Sunday. The Wolfpack has mixed and matched in the No. 2 starting spot, with Ethan Ogburn, Logan Jernigan and Brad Stone the likeliest candidates to pitch Tuesday.